Baghdad Journal

Birthday in Baghdad and Bremmer's Hand

After four days roaming hospital wards--some of the worst suffering I've ever seen--I have a kind of hangover. My stomach was sour this morning for the first time since Amman. Didn't fall asleep last night until four a.m. Then I was swimming in a summer-warm Gulf of Mexico scooping sand dollars from the ocean floor. I brought them to the surface for light, to let them breathe. After a second I let them go and swam back down into the blue with the sand dollars floating around me. The most peaceful dream I've had since I arrived two weeks ago.

I woke without covers, because four days ago one of the housekeepers stole my top-sheet, which had been the flat sheet I'd ripped from the other bed in the room (apparently there's a One Bed, One Sheet policy), and I never use the thin blanket which scratches like a big Saltine. It was my birthday. The heat was already overpowering the air conditioner. I sweat. I was in Baghdad. I was a bit depressed about the fact. But I got over it when I stumbled out of bed and into the living room and Brandon behind the computer sang me a little birthday diddy kind of funny.

I settled my stomach around noon with a mushroom omelette and a Coke, in time, I hoped, for a follow-up interview with Hassan Fattah Pasha. An Iraqi-American, Pasha is the editor of Iraq Today, the only English-language newspaper published in Baghdad. He grew up in Berkeley, though his family figured prominently in the modern birth of Iraq. His family left in 1963. I spoke with him this morning via a satellite phone with a bad connection. He told me he'd been arrested yesterday just before the U.S. picked Iraq Council president, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, was to brief the press. The details of Hassan's arrest lost in the ether. Later when I talked with the newspaper's managing editor Mustafa, he summed up the situation this way: "It was like the scene at a club, man, where you que up"--he's an Iraqi-Brit--"to wait to get to the front, and when you finally get there, your name is not on the list. So when they won't let you in, you que up again, hoping you'll get a different doorman. The guard working the door to the press conference was the asshole doorman. He was even letting in more women than men into the press conference. I don't know why it was such a problem to get in to see Jaafari." Mustafa's most recent editorial is entitled, "Lions Led by Donkeys."

The interview with Hassan never happened. I had difficulty getting in touch with Abu Abdullah, who was off dealing with his own business. While I wait for the phone to ring I chat downstairs with the small gang of building managers: Guis, the one who has had heart surgery,and the matronly woman always behind the counter, and the royal-looking man with eight children. Late nights when I can't sleep I often go downstairs to talk with them. They are a kind of mixed Christian and Muslim family always inviting me for tea, breakfast and lunch. The man with eight children hands me the rest of his Mountain Dew--a liquid I would never think to drink, I drink gratefully--and ushers me outside. I think he is going to drive me to my interview, but instead he tries to hail one of the beat-up taxis racing down the street. I tell him it is too risky for me to get in a taxi. I slap my camera bag. "Alibabas?" he asks and smiles. Yes. "Habibi," he says, a term of endearment, sometimes used between friends. He offers to go with me, but I refuse, not wanting to impose. We walk back inside and he invites me to lunch with him and the others. I sit and they feed me rice, bread and potatoes, a kind of birthday lunch without any of them knowing.

The owner of the apartment building, who had been counting dinars and dollars in his office in the back, comes in and sits with us. He flicks on the television. Some 80's, evening soap opera with translation in Arabic. Nobody watches it. The owner asks me what I do for a living. He asks me what I did before I came to Iraq. Then he tells me you doesn't trust the media. Not Al-Jeezera. Not Al Arabiya. Not the Western media. "They all tell lies," he says, though he watches the news every day to stay connected, educated. He then asks me why the Americans are making life so difficult for Iraqis. He didn't want me to answer so much as he wanted to communicate, to have me listen.

At that moment, I think of the venting people in the Al-Wiya hospital ward the day before [see Of Mobs and Men]. One man sitting on his sick son's bed told me to enjoy the Petrol the U.S. was stealing from Iraq. "Bil A'afiya," he said--I hope you have a good stomach to eat it. Abu Abdullah has used the same expression, though usually before meals that may prove difficult to digest.

The owner of the building tells me more of his ideas, these about Bremmer, about the American soldiers roaming in his home. He folds a small stack of dinars over his fat index finger and counts. He hands money to the apartment managers as they leave the table in front of the TV. Two visitors come in he doesn't know or doesn't know well enough, and immediately he shuts his mouth. Still there is little trust here with people sharing strong opinions. He invites me into his office. He wants to talk more, though in private.

"They say they give us freedom," he says, "But what freedom? What does Freedom mean? It is only an idea. An idea They have. Saddam is gone, but we are still the same. We still have the same mind, the same fear." He presses a finger to his head. "This is the same. Electricity, power, water, this can be fixed in a month, in two months, in a year," he says. "But the Peoples' minds cannot change so quickly." He says Saddam crushed the will of the people. He ruled from behind the walls of his palaces, closed off from the people. He tortured the spirit of Iraqi people, he says.

He says Bremmer and the Coalition Provisional Authority live behind the same walls. It's true: the Coalition's compound is located in one of Saddam's palaces. Bremmer and other adminstrators sleep in air-conditioned trailers on the palace grounds. Companies like Bechtel and Haliburton's subsidiary K.B.R. also have palace space. Lately, the C.P.A. has been at work building a security wall as a buffer between them and potential enemies. The owner says, Like Saddam, they plan in secrecy without consulting the people. He says he doesn't know of one civil institution, including hospitals and schools, Bremmer has visited since he arrived. He says "the Americans" make their own decisions without thinking of the people. He thinks it is the wrong message for the Americans to be ruling Iraq from a place that has become the symbol of their humiliation and disempowerment.

"You must start with the human," he says. "Then you can rebuild people's minds. But Bremmer and the Americans, they don't listen. They are behind a huge wall. And we can't touch them. They live in Saddam's palace. Behind the same wall. They don't know who we are. They don't ask us what we want. If I could just say to him, what I'm saying to you. If I could take Bremmer's hand and walk with him, touch him, then I would know he's not the enemy." He stretches his arm out and pretends to take Bremmer's hand. "But the American's are above us talking down, shouting orders. How can I reach him if he is way up there? How can Bremmer see me?" He says this is the occupying power's biggest mistake. "Saddam has taught us that the American is enemy. We were told lots of things. But I am a Christian. I am different from Muslim. I am more open," he says quietly. Some of his Muslim companions are in the next room. "But still, Saddam is gone, but we are still suffering from him. I still look and see you, American, you are the enemy." He points at me, but we're talking like new friends. He looks deeply hurt, like he wants to cry. He forces himself to hold his head up, a man tired of humiliation. "You have to start with the basic," he says. "That is, the Human. What does freedom mean to Iraqi people if we are not free in our minds?"

Posted by Adam Shemper at August 12, 2003 03:52 AM | TrackBack